Our last cinema trip of the year was to see Greta Gerwig's new adaptation of Little Women. I have to confess to a certain amount of trepidation about this one; I have loved Little Women for nearly 40 years, though I haven't dared to re-read it in adulthood in case it turns out to have been visited by the Suck Fairy (I did read one of Alcott's other novels a few years ago, and found it quite uncomfortably moralistic), and I have generally been disappointed by adaptations (I don't think I even made it to the end of episode 1 of the TV adaptation that was on a couple of years ago). However, I really liked Gerwig's directorial debut, Lady Bird, and the reviews for Little Women were generally very good, so we gave it a try.

As it turned out, I loved Gerwig's interpretation of the story. One of my worries, going with T who has never read the book, was that the adaptation might feel twee, hackneyed or mawkish; Gerwig's choice to tell the story out of order, using the second half of part 2 (the part sometimes published separately as Good Wives, though I always knew them as two halves oft the same book) as a frame with the earlier story told in flashback made it feel fresh and new, and I appreciated the stylistic choice that coloured the "past" scenes with a golden tinge and the "present" with a harsher, bluer light. All of the familiar, beloved scenes from the first half of the novel are there - 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents*', Jo singeing Meg's hair and meeting Laurie at the party, Amy burning Jo's manuscript and then falling through the ice, Meg giving in to vanity at her Vanity Fair - but the main focus of the film is the story of the sisters' later lives, in particular Jo's and Amy's (Meg seems to have less screen time, by comparison, and poor Beth's story is necessarily limited). I'm much less familiar with this part of the novel; I'm sure I have read it just as often as the beginning, but it didn't engage my attention as a child, and hasn't stayed with me in the same way, so I very much enjoyed seeing it on screen. (And maybe I will actually re-read the book soon.)

Saoirse Ronan is very good as Jo, though possibly a bit too pretty and dainty; I kept failing to recognise Emma Watson as Meg, but for me the stand-out performance among the sisters was Florence Pugh as Amy, managing to bring real depth to a character I'd always dismissed as shallow and annoying. (I'm also amused that two of the four March sisters were brought up in Oxford.) Meryl Streep also does a terrifically acerbic Aunt March. And, as a knitter I couldn't help noticing some fabulous shawls (mostly triangular shawls worn crossed over the bust and tied in the back - and I see that Beth's at least is on Ravelry) and at least one really nice pair of colourwork mittens.

All in all, I thought this was a fantastic adaption, though I do wish I'd thought to take extra tissues - I haven't cried so much at a film since I, Daniel Blake!

* which I gather that Clare Balding, on Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire, confidently declared to be the opening line of Middlemarch

La Belle Époque is an entertaining French romcom starring Daniel Auteuil as depressed, out-of-work cartoonist Victor. Uncomfortable with modern technology and mourning the deterioration of his marriage, he takes up the offer of a 'time travel experience' (actually a re-creation facilitated by Antoine, a friend of his son's who owes him a debt of gratitude) to return to 1974, spend time in a bar he used to frequent and re-create his first meeting with his wife Marianne. I was a little worried that it was going to be a film about an older man having an affair with an inappropriately younger woman, but happily that turned out not to be the case. In fact, it's a double romcom; as well as Victor's relationship with Marianne (the always-excellent Fanny Ardant) we follow the tempestuous relationship between Antoine and Margot, the actress playing the young Marianne in the recreation. I found it funny (the scenes of the other recreations being provided by Antoine's company are brilliant), heartwarming and charming.

The Good Liar stars Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren as Roy and Betty, two people of a certain age who meet via an online dating site. It's clear from the start that Roy isn't what he appears to be at all; instead, he's a conman, involved in a variety of shady schemes and with a sideline in scamming wealthy widows out of their savings, and he's lined Betty up as his next victim, despite the obvious opposition of her only relative, her grandson Stephen.

The thriller plot zips along nicely, and while some of the twists seemed a bit obvious there were certainly some surprises. In any case, the main attraction of the film isn't the plot; it's the opportunity to watch McKellen chewing every piece of scenery in sight and Mirren being a total badass, and it delivers both in spades. It's not the most memorable of films, but it was an entertaining diversion for a soggy November evening in what is proving to be a really tough week.

(Content note, however: there is one scene depicting fairly graphic sexual violence involving a child.)

The Farewell, the new film from Chinese-American director Lulu Wang, is a semi-autobiographical study of family relationships and the emigrant experience. It's told from the point of view of Billi, an aspiring Chinese-American writer living in New York. When Billi's grandmother, Nai Nai, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, her family make the decision not to tell her about the diagnosis; instead, they plan a wedding for Billi's cousin Hao Hao and his girlfriend of three months in order to have a pretext for one last family gathering, with Billi's family returning from the USA and Hao Hao's from Japan for the celebration.

This is a funny, touching and thought-provoking film, looking at what family means when parents and siblings can be separated by thousands of miles and go years without seeing each other. It's beautifully shot, too, with a gorgeous piano-led soundtrack, and Awkwafina's performance as Billi, struggling with the family decision to withhold the truth about Nai Nai's diagnosis from her and with the distance from her childhood memories of China, is terrific. We nearly missed this, as the Picturehouse website has been updated and the new listings are an absolute disaster; it's now impossible to see more than one day's listings at a time, and much harder to scroll through the wall-to-wall screenings of Downton Abbey to find anything more interesting, and The Farewell was only on a couple of times, slightly earlier than our ideal 6:15 slot, but I'm glad we managed to get to see it as it's very good.

After an uninspiring few weeks at the cinema, tonight we went to see the other music-based British film branded as "the feel-good hit of the year!" on the sides of buses. Unlike Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle's sunny seaside Beatlemania froth, Gurinder Chada's new film, Blinded by the Light felt like it had some substance to it. Along with, obviously, some of the greatest songs ever written.

Blinded by the Light is based on a memoir by journalist and Springsteen obsessive Sarfraz Manzoor, and tells the story of 17-year-old Javed, an aspiring writer who despairs of ever getting away from his Luton home. It's set against a background of the racial tensions and unemployment of late-80s Britain (the National Front march through Luton, and Javed's father is made redundant following swingeing cutbacks at the Vauxhall works), while at home Javed's traditionalist father refuses to countenance his son's moving away for university or even going to a party hosted by the neighbour he's been friends with all his life. Frustrated and despairing, having to lie about studying English for A-level instead of Economics, Javed's life changes when he listens to the Bruce Springsteen tapes a friend at sixth form college has lent his, and he hears his own life in the Boss's lyrics.

I loved how perfectly the film evoked what it was like to be a teenager in the 80s. There are so many elements that remind me how my past looked, from the blocky cars to the silk scarves Javed's girlfriend Eliza wears tied in a big bow round her hair (I had so many of those scarves!) to the Parker rollerball Javed writes with (I had a Parker rollerball. Did you have a Parker rollerball? If you were a teenager in the UK in the late 1980s, you quite possibly did). And more than that, I loved how it evoked what it was like to listen to the music that spoke to your soul; to put your headphones on, press play on your Walkman (or cheaper own-brand alternative), slide the volume to high and feel like the whole world was a music video unfolding around you. The film does this brilliantly through the use of quasi-fantasy sequences where the people around Javed join in dancing along with him; it could be cheesy and awkward, but for me it came down on the right side of that. There were lots of pop-culture in-jokes which raised laughs among the audiece (Michael Fish's 'A woman phoned the BBC to say there was a hurricane on the way...' and Javed's father's response to finally listening to Springsteen were the biggest ones), and while absolutely not romanticising either the 80s or Luton and not skirting the very real issue of racism, then and now, there are also a lot of moments where people are shown to be kinder and more generous than first appearances might have led us to believe. I definitely recommend this, even if you don't like Springsteen, though obviously it's even better if you do like the songs.

Vita and Virginia, Chanya Button's film of Eileen Atkins' 1992 play telling the story of Vita Sackville-West's affair with Virginia Woolf, should have been right up my street, but in fact it really didn't work for me. As so often happens with films adapted from plays, it felt very stagy, and none of the characters really convinced. This was partly because, for some reason Button had clearly decided that everyone should speak with the cut-glass vowels of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, which had the effect of utterly destroying any sense of realism and felt particularly jarring in contrast to the completely non-period-appropriate electronic soundtrack.

I also had huge problems with how young many of the actors were; Duncan Grant, as played by early-30s Adam Gillen, looked liked a schoolboy with a fake moustache, and Emerald Fennell was also at least a decade younger than she should have been as Vanessa Bell. The worst example of this was definitely Elizabeth Debicki, at 28, playing a rather insipid and ethereal Woolf, who was actually in her early 40s at the time of the affair with Sackville-West. Instead of being a decade older than her lover, this film's Woolf appears younger than Gemma Arterton's Vita, which may be part of the reason why it was hard to understand Vita's initial hero-worshipping obsession, though I also thought there was a definite absence of chemistry between the two leads. There were some nice outfits, but if you want to watch a biographical drama about historical lesbians, I recommend you save the cost of the cinema ticket and watch Gentleman Jack on iPlayer instead.

Richard Curtis may have retired from making films, but he wrote the script for Danny Boyle's new film Yesterday, and it is basically like the most Richard Curtisy Richard Curtis film ever. By which I mean that, like pretty much every other film Curtis ever made, it's the story of a vaguely useless and slightly scruffy but basically decent bloke who spends a lot of time not realising that his gorgeous female friend is madly in love with him and then more time failing to find the words to tell her that he's madly in love with her too, but somehow still manages to end up with her, probably with the help of his completely useless and very scruffy best friend, whose purpose in the film is about 50% comic relief and 50% actually making the hero look good by comparison.

Yesterday's vaguely useless and slightly scruffy but basic decent bloke is Himesh Patel's Jack Malik, an aspiring musician who is on the verge of chucking it all to return to teaching when, after a road accident which takes place during a 12-second electrical blackout affecting the entire planet, he wakes up to find that he is the only person who remembers the Beatles (and also Coke and cigarettes). Passing off the Fab Four's songs as his own, Jack's musical career rapidly takes off, from playing local pubs to an appearance on local TV, to being drafted in to support Ed Sheeran at short notice and signing a deal with a major label which makes him the biggest star in the world, even though this means no longer being managed by the gorgeous female friend who's madly in love with him (in this case, Lily James's Ellie).

It's not a deep or thoughtful film. It doesn't really examine the full ramifications of the sudden absence of the Beatles from the world (it appears that Oasis also no longer exist, but Coldplay do, and the rest of the course of musical history is basically unchanged) or the enthusiastic reception of 1960s songs in 2019 (in one scene, Jack supports Ed Sheeran in Moscow and (obviously) comes out with 'Back in the USSR', which goes down a storm despite its reference to a country which ceased to exist around the time Jack was born; something which is lampshaded by Sheeran, but which still doesn't make much sense). There is one surprisingly poignant scene which, for me at least, gave the whole thing a slightly bittersweet cast, but overall it's a basically a light, fluffy romcom with some fabulous songs, and Patel sings them well.

Booksmart is the directorial debut from actor Olivia Wilde. Written by an all-female team, it follows friends Molly and Amy on their last day of high school. Molly and Amy are classic overachievers, having chosen to spend their high school years working hard instead of partying with their classmate so they can get into good colleges. There's only one problem: the kids who partied got into good colleges too, and Molly and Amy decide that spending their final night of high school partying is the only way to avoid feeling like they've wasted the last four years.

This is a sparky, sassy comedy, mostly reliant on witty dialogue for its laughs (though there is some gross-out humour and a small amount of embarassment humour, though much less than you might expect). It's also really heartwarming and uplifting, particularly in the way that it rejects the high school comedy trope of conflict between the different tribes - jocks, nerds, skaters, stoners - in favour of a more subtle approach which sees the members of the graduating class realising that there is more binding them together than dividing them. Its cast of young characters is both racially diverse and inclusive in terms of sexuality (Amy's lesbianism is accepted by her classmates even when her nerdiness isn't, and there are other queer characters among the background cast). Visually and aurally, it has a vivid, immediate, in-your-face quality which mirrors the intensity of teenage experience. I liked it a lot, though it clearly wasn't to everyone's taste as two women seated along from us walked out about half an hour in.

Woman at War is an Icelandic comedy in the same dark vein as Rams and Under the Tree. It centres on Halla, a middle-aged choir director who leads a secret double life as "The Mountain Woman", an eco-terrorist focused on disrupting industrial production with the aim of discouraging foreign industrial investment. Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir plays a double lead as Halla, alternating cycling through Reykjavík, conducting choir rehearsals and discussing adopting a Ukrainian orphan with running across mountains, toppling electricity pylons and evading pursuit inside a glacier, and her twin sister Àsa, a hippieish yoga teacher. I have to say that, for me, one of the great delights of this film was seeing so much screen time given to a woman in her 40s who spends a lot of the time in a lopapeysa and hiking boots and who, when depicted changing after swimming, is pulling on sensible big pants, though the Icelandic scenery is also stunning and, appropriately given the eco-conscious message of the film, is allowed to play a starring role. Director Benedikt Erlingsson doesn't allow the humour of the film to get in the way of ramping up the tension as the forces of law and order close in on Halla, and presents an absorbing portrait of an Iceland that isn't quite the liberal paradise many of us like to think it is (apart from the government's pandering to foreign industrial investors and the liberal use of roadblocks and surveillance to track down the saboteur, the hapless black tourist who keeps being arrested on suspicion with very litte evidence makes a serious point underneath the comedy). The cinematography is fantastic, and while the device of having the soundtrack performed by on-screen musicians seemed rather odd at first (especially as their first appearance is on a remote moss-covered mountainside) but actually worked really well (and I liked the music a lot too).

Neil Jordan's new film, Greta, is a classic stalker thriller. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as Frances, a Bostonian innocent in New York City whose well-meaning act of returning a bag found on the subway to its owner ("In New York, if you find a bag you call the bomb squad!" chides her more worldly-wise flatmate) lets her in for more than she bargains for as Isabelle Huppert's Greta proves not to be the delighful new friend she appears to be. Nothing in the plot is really going to come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the stalker genre, and the jumps are all well-signposted by music and atmosphere, but they're jumpy nonetheless, and while if I'm honest it tended a bit too much towards horror for me it was entertaining enough (and probably better than the alternative, Red Joan, which I suspect would be rather formulaic and which reviews suggest suffers from Not Enough Judi Dench).